Thursday, January 28, 2016

Halo

The worst part about a series is that no matter how much I struggled through the first one, I am compelled to keep going. Surely this is a registered mental illness.

Halo - Alexandra Adornetto


Three angels – Gabriel, the warrior; Ivy, the healer; and Bethany, the youngest and most human – are sent by Heaven to bring good to a world falling under the influence of darkness. They work hard to conceal their luminous glow, superhuman powers, and, most dangerous of all, their wings, all the while avoiding all human attachments.

Then Bethany meets Xavier Woods, and neither of them is able to resist the attraction between them. Gabriel and Ivy do everything in their power to intervene, but the bond between Xavier and Bethany seems too strong.

The angel’s mission is urgent, and dark forces are threatening. Will love ruin Bethany or save her?


So I found this book on some list on some blog as being the first in an "amazing trilogy" and I was fresh off of Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush series which was gold. Absolute gold. I was in the mood for another angel series and while I knew this couldn't be a replacement for Becca Fitzpatrick, I remained hopeful. I found all three books of the trilogy on a used book website for less than a dollar each and it turns out they were library copies, and I felt like I got super lucky.

You know why these were less than a dollar? Because, I'm making an assumption because I haven't read book two or three yet, but this was b-o-r-i-n-g. This took me WEEKS to read. Weeks. Absolutely ridiculous. I would have stopped reading it if it was a stand alone and not in a trilogy that I own the rest of but here I am, feeling obligated to finish.

So where to start? Well I should start with the author being 18 when she wrote this. She has a strong educational writing background and wrote her first novel at 14, I believe. To write a trilogy at 18 is a lofty goal so I'll give her that. But let's be real, over half of this book could, and should, be edited out. There is literally no reason for it other than the fact she clearly wanted to write a long ass book for basically no reason. Secondly, you can tell the author is a teenager because of the contents of the book. Yes, it's a YA book but the entire thing has a high level of immaturity that no adult author, seasoned in basic relationships, could fake.

The next issue I take with it is for as much as we're teased about Gabriel and Ivy and their status in Heaven, they are basically useless characters in this book. We have Bethany, who has zero idea of what the hell she's doing as an angel and of course, falls in love with a boy with some kind of hero complex and they are inseparable. Enter bad boy villian who doesn't really do much. Well, he does do a lot of bad things but it's overshadowed by page after page of us reading about Bethany and how great she thinks Xavier is.

And while I understand the book is about angels on Earth to help out, they seem pretty useless and not helpful. But the book is really over the top preachy. The book also ends with a rather lame ending, we have a huge build up and then.... nothing. I'm not even sure if I'm really going to bother with book two or three or if I should just put this trilogy in the donation bin. But I'm not anxious to read anything else by this author because it was really terribly written.

So. Whomp, whomp- total disappointment.

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